Stored Procedure Coding Guidelines and Limitations

Stored procedures should be treated just like reusable application code. Follow these suggested guidelines to ensure your stored procedures are solid and robust:

Check all parameters for validity and return an error message if a problem exists.

Be sure that the parameter datatypes match the column datatypes they are compared against to avoid datatype mismatches and poor query optimization.

Check the @@error system function after each SQL statement, especially insert, update, and delete, to verify that the statements executed successfully. Return a status code other than 0 if a failure occurs.

Be sure to comment your code so that when you or others have to maintain it, the code is self-documenting. ...

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